


I love it when we play 1950

by dairygrill



Category: Derry Girls (TV)
Genre: F/F, cute anxious one and dark grumpy one vibes, height difference!, lots of cute friendship moments with the gang, maybe hints at James/Erin, physical affection!, shhh I'm a lesbian leave me alone, yes that's a king princess reference
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22832935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dairygrill/pseuds/dairygrill
Summary: Michelle is not well acquainted with Jealousy. When it starts to creep into her life, the one common factor Clare Devlin.When Clare gave Erin her birthday present. Seeing how Clare started at Charlene Kavanagh in Chemistry. Drunken Clare telling Michelle how pretty Mrs De Brun was. Michelle’s dancing heartbeat like dust in the sunlight whenever Clare would look at her with those bright, happy eyes. The way in which any sign of affection from Clare would send Michelle spiralling like a high, Atlantic wave.
Relationships: Clare Devlin/Michelle Mallon
Comments: 9
Kudos: 83





	1. Desperation

The school formal was not a school formal this year. It had been replaced with a 50s prom, courtesy of Jenny, and rather resembled a gaudy 70s disco, the mirror ball on the ceiling sending little white fireflies buzzing around the room. The old sound system had been dismantled and in its place stood a group of middle-aged, white men, who had formed a band in their teenage years and never quite been able to give it up. Their standard had dropped over time, and considering that they’d only started out as cheap imitations of John, Paul, George and Ringo, they weren’t up to much at all anymore.

Jenny Joyce was in her element, gliding about the room in what she believed to be a glamorous, empowered manner. Michelle sucked her teeth, and made a point of checking the time. The boy-toys she had bought along were the embodiment of watching paint dry, and none of her friends had turned up yet. She shuffled over to some chairs in the corner of the room and took a seat, chewing absently at a hangnail.

Once more, Michelle checked the clock, but in her boredom forgot to actually engage with the numbers, and found her mind drifting elsewhere. Initially, it panned over her friendship group and questions of their whereabouts; it wasn’t like Michelle to be the first to arrive. Then the images in her head focused and zoomed into one particular friend.

Not for the first time recently, Michelle occupied her mind with visions of blonde and blue and pink. Lightly waving hair tumbling across shoulders like an avalanche; eyes a shade of blue that was indistinguishable, somehow, from both July skies and January frost; rose-coloured satin cheeks and lips; small hands intertwined with her own. Visions of rose-gold and mint green and pale grey. Feminine and fairylike and flickering with passion.

Michelle shook herself out of her stupor with a blink and brushed it under the rug for a moment as the double doors swung open and Clare wandered in, arms linked with Mae’s. They were chatting, and a look of both joy and surprise flitted across Clare’s features as she took in Jenny’s attempts at decor. Like notes an octave apart, playing in pianissimo, Michelle’s heartbeat slowed watching her friend move. She had never seen Clare like this; ski-pants folded away and replaced with Audrey-Hepburn-level class and grace. Clare caught her eye and smiled, but by the time Michelle’s body had caught up with her brain, Clare had already looked away, laughing at something Mae had said.

Michelle had always felt like a victor, or some sort of lady-luck, never having found herself acquainted with Jealousy or Envy. She was generally like the object of a puppy’s affection when it came to love, perpetually less attached to people than they were to her. So when she felt the anger rising from her diaphragm, she had very little reason to believe it was Jealousy paying her a visit. Instead, she found herself storming across the room to Clare, with a mysterious anger.

“You look hot,” she blurted, and felt her confused heart blink in shock. That wasn’t what she had meant to say.

Clare’s face brightened, like the lighting of a candle, and Michelle’s anger momentarily dissolved.

“Thank you!”

“No, I mean like, actually hot. Like physically hot. You’d better not be sweating in that dress, Clare,” Michelle’s anger explained itself and her heart sighed with relief, “They won’t give me a refund if there’s a wiff of it,”

“I’m not sweating,” Clare protested.

“Let me check,” Michelle darted forwards, but Clare dodged her, always one to avoid human contact.

“Get off me!” she spat.

Michelle felt it; the not-anger, still settled deep in her stomach, but rising now to her chest. It was like a gas, filling its container.

“Fine,” she said, “But if they won’t refund it, you are absolutely paying me back.”  
Clare sighed, “It wasn’t your money in the first place, Michelle.”

Michelle chewed her lip, the twisting in her abdomen throwing her off balance. The silence was swelling, and so she said the first thing that wondered into her mind, which for some reason was:  
“Where’s Mae? I thought she was supposed to be your date.”

The twisting stopped, leaving behind an incredible tension, as though the knot had been tied. It was almost like suspense.

“I… I don’t know,” Clare started, “She said something about… then she just…”

Michelle’s eyes instinctively darted to Clare’s face, which was scrunched up, searching the room.

“Hey,” she said, placing a hand on Clare’s arm, “I’m sure she’s not gone far.”  
The twisting continued, and Michelle tried to ignore it into disappearing.

“Right,” Clare nodded, then paused, chewing her lip, “Maybe.”

But Clare was still fidgeting, and so Michelle instinctively continued speaking, a string of words collapsing from her mouth.

“Honestly though, Clare, she doesn’t deserve you. I wish you could be here tonight with a girl who… who actually gets you.”

Clare stilled, and gave Michelle a soft, if confused, little smile.

“Thank you.”  
And Michelle couldn’t ignore butterflies that suddenly took flight in her stomach. Which, of course, didn’t mean that she wouldn’t try to ignore them.

She decided they were a desperation to be drunk, an urge she had foreseen and was more than happy to oblige.

“I’ll be back in a mo, Clare.”

She turned on her heel towards the bathrooms, leaving the echoes of music and balloons behind her. Finding herself in the end cubicle, she reached into her bra and pulled out a small bottle of vodka. She swigged it, bit by bit, and allowed herself momentarily, the opportunity to just think.

Michelle tried never to indulge in self-reflection, finding that it was never a road she enjoyed travelling. But on this occasion, curiosity overpowered her.

She looked back over the past few months at every time this twisting feeling had occurred. She laid a year of her life out like polaroid photos along a wall, romanticised and incomplete. And everywhere she looked, the one thing each significant moment had in common was Clare.

When Clare gave Erin her birthday present. Seeing how Clare started at Charlene Kavanagh in Chemistry. Drunken Clare telling Michelle how pretty Mrs De Brun was. Michelle’s dancing heartbeat like dust in the sunlight whenever Clare would look at her with those bright, happy eyes. The way in which any sign of affection from Clare would send Michelle spiralling like a high, Atlantic wave.

Then that moment at the sleepover.

Michelle had woken in the early hours, when everything seems blurry and only half-living. Amidst the blueness and the shadows, a soft echo of moonlight drifted in through the gap under Erin’s curtain, falling across Clare’s face as a tiny slice of river. Michelle blinked her eyes open, and found herself just watching Clare sleep. The light flicker of her eyelashes, and scrunching of her nose, as though she was anxious about something even in her dreams. The single lock of hair across her cheek. It was as if something, once liquid, solidified in Michelle’s chest, so soft it had until now, been forgotten; disregarded as some bleary-eyed moment of weakness and naivety. Now it shone for Michelle like some checkpoint star in the night sky, Northern and burning.

Bringing the bottle to her lips, Michelle realised it was empty, and then she blinked, and found that she was crying.

As Michelle’s biographer in this instance, we must establish they they were not tears of sadness, nor of anger, but rather they ran in the floods of an intense, entirely broken, entirely human desperation.

Desperation for love, mainly, but also for release. It was that desire, not to die, but rather to have never lived.

She stood up and discovered, from the crunch of glass beneath her feet, that she had dropped the bottle.

_Great,_ she thought, _That’s all I need._

Staring in the mirror on the wall, she dragged her hands across her face, then leant on the sink, eyes closed.

_Breathe._

_In._

_And out._

_In._

_And out._

Michelle’s eyes floated open and she continued filling and emptying her lungs to the same, steady rhythm.

_This is not gonna break me,_ she decided. _I am stronger than that. I am fucking capable of dealing with this._

_In._

_And out._

_Maybe I’m gay. Maybe I’m not._

_In._

_And out._

_But either way, I’m fucking okay._

And once her breath had steadied to the rush of the shore, in and out, she wiped the mascara from under her eyes, swept the glass into a bin, and walked out of the door, the adagio flow of alcohol burning its way up her spine.


	2. Red, white and blue

Michelle had never seen Derry this crowded. She had thought the queue outside of Dennis’ Wee Shop when he got in the new Take That album in was the biggest crowd she would see here, but this was taking things to a whole new level. The square swelled with reds and blues and whites (and pinks and purples, thanks to Dennis), and there was a buzz of anticipation simmering in the heads of the locals. The President of the US was in their tiny little corner of Northern Ireland, and yet Michelle couldn’t enjoy any of it. Not the buzz, or the people, or the colours. Not even the alcohol that ran through the bloodstream of the congregation.

She pushed her way through swathes of people, disappointment weighing on her chest like lead. First she was able to distinguish Orla’s face amongst the host of strangers’, agitated and expectant. Then she found Clare and then finally - with a stab to the gut - Erin, who looked most scared of all, her lower lip quivering.

“Well?” Erin asked, “Where is he?”

Michelle didn’t speak for a moment, or couldn’t. Couldn’t admit to Erin that she’d let James get away. She knew, as they all did, that a certain thread attached James to Erin, and that this severance would cause a wound to both of them. Michelle blinked down at the pavement for a moment, feet shuffling against the concrete with nauseating friction.

“Gone,” she muttered.

As Michelle looked back up, she caught Erin in the pretence of disinterest turning her face away, and knew that she was crying.

“When’s he coming back?” Orla asked, eyes wide and child-like.

“He’s not, Orla.”

“No,” Orla shook her head, “He always comes back. And… and he’s gonna miss the Clintons.”

“Aye.”

“Why didn’t you stop him, Michelle?”

Michelle’s chest seized up.

“What the fuck did you want me to do, Clare? Tie him to me? He’s not a fucking dog, he’ll go if he wants to go—”

“It’s our fault, isn’t it?” Erin turned back around, tears sparkling in her eyes, “It’s not just you Michelle. It’s us. All of us. We… we pushed him away. I mean, of course he wants to leave.”

Orla’s confused eyes blinked at Michelle, then at Clare, and then at Erin. She wrapped her arms around Erin’s shoulders and buried her face into her neck.

“He’ll be back, Erin,” she whispered, “I know he will.”

Michelle coughed away a sob.

“Fuck him,” she said, clearing her throat being about as effective as trying to wash away sand from the beach, “The fucking President’s gonna be here soon, who… who gives a shit about James, eh?”

The girls nodded at her, unconvinced. They all turned in unison to stare blankly at the podium onstage. The pretence of normality was as palpable as cat piss in the snow, and yet they all looked fixedly past.

_I couldn’t give less of a fuck if I tried,_ Michelle reassured herself. _He was a dick._

And as much as she tried to convince herself that it was fine and that she wouldn’t miss him, she couldn’t stop the welling up of tears from her chest, and so she did the next best thing and - without removing her stare from the podium - felt next to her for Clare’s hand.

To her surprise, Clare didn’t pull away. In fact, she reached back, squeezed tight and for just a moment, the tears drained away like rainwater down a canal. But a dissipation often leads to a resurgence and so, like a diminuendo followed by a crescendo, Michelle’s tears swelled again and choked her.

And then Orla was shouting.

“I see him!”

Erin could hardly bring herself to speak, weighed down as she was with remorse.

“You’re facing the wrong way, Orla.”  
“No, look! It’s James!”

She was right. There, above the crowds and the colours and the buzz, James stood beaming from ear to ear.


	3. Maybe it's not them

That night, the gang bundled themselves into the Quinn’s living room, scared that if they let one another go they might drift away for good. James slept on the sofa, Erin and Orla cuddled into him like koalas on a tree. Michelle smiled at them from her position on the floor, leaning against Clare’s chair. They were the only two awake. The laughter and chatter and general buzz from the President’s visit had died down, and left in its wake the hush of moonlight. Michelle felt that, perhaps, her and Clare were the only people left awake in the whole world; maybe it was a side effect of the quiet, or of her acute awareness of Clare’s body behind her; of Clare’s perfume; Clare’s sleepy eyes and pyjamas.

“Do you think they know they’re in love?”

Clare’s curbed voice prodded its way through the silence, rather than cutting or shattering it.

“What do you mean?”  
“James and Erin.”

Michelle pondered it for a moment. She regretted that she had bitter taste when thinking about her friend and her cousin’s feelings for one another, and yet it wasn’t something she could shift. Not without time.

But she could ignore it, in this instance.

“I think they know that they love each other.”

Clare hummed. “But do they know they’re _in_ love.”

Michelle shrugged, and the silence drifted back into the room, setting the hairs on the back of her neck on end.

She shuffled over and rested her head, carefully, in Clare’s lap. There was a moment of complete stillness as Clare froze and then, all of a sudden, she started to stroke her fingers through Michelle’s hair.

Michelle liked to believe that she didn’t blush; that she would never dirty herself with being that coy or tentative. In that moment, however, she felt the burning satin wrap itself around, not just her cheeks, but her entire face, and wished that someone would wash it off.

“I’m cold,” she stated, despite feeling warmer than she had possibly ever been.

She felt Clare’s body subdue behind her as though tranquillised, and turned to face her. Clare chewed her lip silently, caught in an internal debate. Then she thawed, and patted the tiny gap of chair next to her. Michelle smiled and scrambled onto the seat.

They were so close now that Michelle could feel the radiation from Clare’s face on her own cheek, could feel the pulse in her leg. She cleared her throat in shock as Clare cuddled into her side, arms wrapped around her waist in a way that was both suffocating and intoxicating.

Perhaps this was the dizzying euphoria people felt while being strangled.

“Can you believe _the President_ was in Derry, and we _left_ so we could see the same dickhead we see every day?”

Clare laughed, and glanced up at Michelle, the laugh catching in her throat as they made eye contact.

“Maybe it’s not James and Erin,” Clare suddenly blurted, as though in a trance, thinking aloud instead of speaking.

Michelle squinted.

“Huh?”

“Maybe James and Erin aren’t the ones in love,” Clare rephrased.

The whole world froze, leaving only a bubble around Clare and Michelle. For what felt like a whole minute, the pair just stared at each other, Clare’s hand burning into Michelle’s lower back like an iron. 

And then a blush crept up Clare’s cheeks. “I mean, maybe it… it was you and Clinton all along.”

Michelle’s heart dropped, and she forced a laugh.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’ve always wanted to ride an American lad.”


	4. Making Breakfast

At some point they must have all transferred upstairs because when Michelle woke up, Erin was spreadeagled in bed beside her.

“Erin,” she whispered sharply and then, slightly louder, “Erin, budge up.”  
Erin’s eyelids flickered but she didn’t say anything.

“I know you’re awake, Erin.”  
Again, Erin said nothing.

“I swear to fuck, Erin, if you don’t move over I’m gonna wrestle you outta this fucking bed!”

For several minutes Michelle continued in this manner, but to no avail. By the time she decided to give up, Erin had taken up the guise of fake-snoring. And so, Michelle huffed and dragged herself out of bed, careful to avoid standing on Orla as she made her way to the door.

She crept downstairs, past Erin and Orla’s baby photos and towards the kitchen.

And then she jumped out of her skin at the sight of Clare.

“Jesus Christ, Clare, you just gave me a heart attack.”

Clare spun round from where she was stood by the stove.

“Michelle! Sorry, I didn’t think anyone else would be up this early.”

Michelle shrugged, then sniffed the air.

“What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep so,” Clare explained, “I thought I’d start making everyone breakfast.”

“Omelettes?”

Clare nodded.

“I’ll help,” Michelle said.

As it transpired, Michelle’s idea of ‘helping’ involved spilling salt on the floor (“You’ll summon the devil, Michelle, throw it over your shoulder! No, not that shoulder, Michelle, the other one!”), turning the heat up too high, and burning the first omelette.

“Michelle,” Clare sighed, “Can you stop helping, please?”

Michelle was about to fight back when she glanced round and saw the agitated determination on Clare’s face. She felt a fluttering in her heart, a release of some sort, and then total calm.

“Fine,” she said, “I’ll just watch.”

She pulled out a chair at the table and admired Clare as she worked, chuckling to herself as Clare had to pull out a stool to reach the cupboards. The sun was halfway done rising, they were halfway out of the dark, and gold leaf sparked its way through Clare’s hair. Clare huffed and puffed around the room, whining when she made mistakes and it should have annoyed the fuck out of Michelle. Should have driven her completely insane until she had to leave the room.

But it didn’t. Instead, it just made her smile.

“Clare?” She said.

It wasn’t a question, not really. But it wasn’t a statement either. It hung in the air, a desperate plea, but also a resignation. Michelle was giving up. Giving in. It was, she decided, worth a try.

“Last night you said,” Michelle toed the line, unsure of which direction to walk, “you said, maybe it wasn’t Erin and James that are in love. What did you mean?”  
Clare froze, and Michelle thought she heard her swallow.

“I… it was a joke. I was talking about you and… and Clinton, like I said.”

Michelle breathed in and out. In and out. Then she tried again.

“But, did you? Or… Clare, look at me.”

Clare turned tentatively around, and with a rush of blood to her heart, Michelle realised that Clare was blushing. Pink, rosy and oh so obvious. A sudden smugness overcame Michelle, but she suppressed it for a moment.

“Did you mean me and Clinton or,” she paused, wanting to feel the moment pass like a breeze through a window, “or did you mean me and you?”

The moment crystallised; for a second, or a minute or an hour, time simply came to a halt. The air dried up, and the hearts of both girls stopped. They just stared at one another, tentative and passionate and desperate. And then, Clare’s voice, scarcely a whisper.

“Us.”

Michelle laughed. She couldn’t help it, the complete elation, complete conceit, complete hopefulness had just been tied to her with balloon strings. But at this reaction, Clare collapsed in on herself like a black hole.

“I mean it’s not,” Clare began, eyes shining,” I don’t… I wouldn’t… it’s not really, um, I… sorry.”

“Clare.”  
This time it was insistent. Grounding. Sharp.

“I’m in love with you,” Michelle stated, pure and simple and perhaps the most honest thing she’d said in ages.

“What?”

“I’m in love with you.”  
“Oh,” Clare breathed, “Okay. In… in like a romantic way? Not… you don’t mean, like, as a friend or…”

Michelle sighed, her eyes rolling involuntarily.

“Yes, Clare. I’m in love with you in a romantic way.”

There was a long pause and for a split second, Michelle thought she’d read the signals wrong. But then Clare spoke.

“Why?”

And Michelle laughed again, but this time Clare smiled too. Michelle stood up, and walked towards Clare. She took her hands, and felt a thrill rush through her when she didn’t pull away.

“Because I am. Because you’re beautiful, and brave, and clever, and funny, and you scrunch your nose up when you panic and squint - like that - when you’re confused.”

Clare let go of one of Michelle’s hands and reached up to her face, smoothing out the creasebetween her eyebrows.

“Oh.”

“This is the bit where you tell me you’re in love with me as well,” Michelle smirked.

Clare blinked.

“Of course I am.”

The sunlight and Michelle’s heart danced a pas de deux. She squeezed Clare’s hand, and she leaned in and she kissed her.


End file.
